30 Sep “The New Italian Design” in Cape Town
On the occasion of Cape Town Design Capital 2014, Triennale Design Museum in collaboration with ITA presents for the first time in South Africa an upgraded and updated edition of The New Italian Design exhibition at The Waterfront Lookout, in Cape Town, from 5th until 25 October 2014: an overview on contemporary Italian design that explains and describes the transition of the movement and its links with economic, political, and technology changes that occurred over the past Century.
Triennale Design Museum, the first museum of Italian design, is directed by Silvana Annicchiarico, and has organized this exhibition to analyze, value and promote the new Italian creativity.
As a travelling exhibition, The New Italian Design was presented in Madrid (2007), Istanbul (2010) Beijing and Nantou (2012), Bilbao, San Francisco and Santiago Chile (2013) with a great success with audience and press.
The exhibition presents works from 133 designers with 288 projects. It includes 189 designers for product design, 28 for graphics, 28 for objects linked to the body like jewelry, handbags and accessories, 7 for research, 32 for food design, 4 for interior design.
The scene that emerges is rich and multifaceted; it starts from furniture design and touches upon new forms of communication, from food to web design, from fashion to textile design, from jewel design to graphic and multimedia all the way to interior design and object design.
The exhibited works range from self produced prototypes to large-series products, from works of art to merely industrial artefacts. Many of the involved designers are already well established at an international level and are employed by important companies in the industry, many others deal with the art word and small-scale production, and many others as well are real makers, able to control the entire process of a product, from the concept to the communication.
Presented for the first time in 2007, at Triennale di Milano, The New Italian Design is the result of a survey on a national scale focused on the passage from the XX to the XXI century and the substantial change in the role of the profession.
Silvana Annicchiarico says: “Contemporary design is to be found in a decidedly different model from the one that dominated in the age of the ‘Masters’. In those days, design culture aimed to create finished, functional products, whereas today – in what has in a certain sense become a ‘mass profession’ – design generates processes more than products, and appears primarily as a form of self-representation of the designer’s ability to imagine, create and innovate. Today’s new designers are neither the heirs nor the pupils of the various Munaris, Magistrettis and Castiglionis. They are something else. Insisting on thinking of them as ‘little’ masters means to continue forcing them parasitically into twentieth-century paradigms that no longer hold true. It means doing an injustice to them and to their diversity and originality, as well as to the design system as a whole. Finding one’s way around the new, ever-changing world of Italian design, which is made of team effort and horizontal movements more than individual, vertical actions, requires no nostalgia for a golden age that has had its time. What is needed is a new ability to explore and take risks, and possibly even lose one’s way, only to find it again. The New Italian Design exhibition is an attempt to move in this direction”.
Arturo Dell’Acqua Bellavitis, president of Fondazione Museo del Design-Triennale Design Museum, says: “The works by young designers allow us to capture different languages of the world of Italian creativity and the research lines of our production that, through technological innovation, seeks to maintain the leadership in the market, while keeping the appearance of an anthropocentric focus that often ends in smiles, new sensitivity to the environment, research for the good and well done design“.
Andrea Branzi, curator of the exhibition, talks about the new generation of designers in the exhibition: “Design seems to have become female all over the globe, regardless of the sex of the designer: it is fleeting, delicate and sensitive, it has less testosterone but more intelligence. This new generation of designers is experiencing a sort of refoundation of the world, starting from the bottom, from the domestic, the superfluous, the autobiographic, the useless. They represent a new world, but have no plans or even manifestos”.
Works by: 4P1B Design Studio, Massimiliano Adami, Massimiliano Alajmo, Arabeschi di latte, Antonio Aricò, Dodo Arslan, Stefano Asili, Enrico Azzimonti, Alessandra Baldereschi, Gabriele Basei, BenedettiEdizioni, Thomas Berloffa, Alessandro Biamonti, Giorgio Biscaro, Giorgio Bonaguro, Denise Bonapace, Massimo Bottura, Alessandro Busana, Pier Bussetti, Elio Caccavale, Fabio Cammarata, Moreno Cedroni, Cristina Celestino, Cristina Chiappini, Mariavera Chiari, Matteo Cibic, Ciboh, Alessandro Ciffo, CLS Architetti, Silvia Cogo, Carlo Contin, Luisa Lorenza Corna, Antonio Cos, Simona Costanzo, Carlo Cracco, Ctrlzack, Manuel Dall’Olio, Lorenzo Damiani, Deepdesign, Carmine Deganello, Andrea Deppieri, Designtrip, Leonardo Di Renzo, Sandra Dipinto, David Dolcini, dotdotdot, Esterni, Francesco Faccin, Sandra Faggiano, Odoardo Fioravanti, Formafantasma, Manuela Gandini, Gionata Gatto, Ilaria Gibertini, Roberto Giolito, Giopato&Coombes, Alessandro Gnocchi, Monica Graffeo, Diego Grandi, Gumdesign, HABITSmln, Giulio Iacchetti, Ildoppiosegno, jekyll & hyde, JoeVelluto, Lagranja, Marco Lambri, Francesca Lanzavecchia, Leftloft, Emilio S. Leo, LLdesign, Concetta Lorenzo, LS Graphic Design, Stefania Lucchetta, Emanuele Magini, Elia Mangia, Stefano Marchetti, Ilaria Marelli, Miriam Mirri, Bruno Morello, Chiara Moreschi, N!03 Studio ennezerotre, Luca Nichetto, Davide Oldani, Barbara Paganin, Lorenzo Palmeri, Daniele Papuli, Donata Paruccini, Edoardo Perri, Gabriele Pezzini, Piano Design, Sylvia Pichler, Angela Ponzini, Aldo Presta, Matteo Ragni, Marcantonio Raimondi Malerba, Riccardofabio, Ivana Riggi, rnd_lab, Andrea Ruschetti, Elena Salmistrano, Fabrizio Schiavi, Luca Schieppati, Gianmaria Sforza, Brian Sironi, Stefano Soave, Valerio Sommella, Sonnoli Leonardo, Studio FM Milano, Studio Ghigos, Studio Natural, Paolo Bazzani, Studio Pepe, Studio Pierandrei Associati, Studio Temp, Studiocharlie, Studioxdesigngroup, Tankboys, Stefano Tonti, Marco Tortoioli Ricci, Total Tool, Barbara Uderzo, Paolo Ulian, Francesco Valtolina, Vittorio Venezia, Davide Vercelli, Marco Zavagno, Zetalab, Marco Zito, Matteo Zorzenoni, ZPZ Partners, ZUP Associati.